Latest Thoughts

I'm proud to share that Merrio is now used every week by companies and managers to help them better understand their teams. Over the past seven months, I've received incredible feedback from the beta users on what they need to help them gain insights into the needs of their teams. This has resulted in great additions to the offering. Here's a couple listed below.

Quick and Informative Surveys

Merrio takes almost no effort to get useful feedback from your team - by first preselecting survey questions for you, followed by delivering the survey in a way that works best for your team, and then making it astonishingly easy and fast to answer.

Weekly Question - one click and your team is done.

Creating Conversations

By design, surveys in Merrio are not anonymous. This affords an opportunity for you, as the manager, to understand who is challenged on a particular spectrum. And most importantly, for you to then follow up with them to help resolve the concern.

Survey questions are aligned to one of nine categories to help you better understand your team. In aggregate, and over time, these single question surveys paint a picture of the health of your team. If the charts are left-shifted (larger volumes of answers), then your team is feeling pretty good about the particular topic. And if right-shifted, then you likely have some work to do.

Survey Results - aligned To critical categories

Get Started With Your Team

Merrio will help you detect problems before they become a crisis, help you identify issues affecting your teams, and help you better understand your teams.

In one of the few controlled eco-sychology experiments, Berman asked 38 University of Michigan students to study lists of random numbers and recite them from memory in reverse order before completing another attention-draining task in which they memorized the locations of certain words arranged in a grid. Half the students subsequently strolled along a predefined path in an arboretum for about an hour whereas the other half walked the same distance through highly trafficked streets of downtown Ann Arbor for the same period of time. Back at the lab the students memorized and recited digits once again. On average, volunteers that had ambled among trees recalled 1.5 more digits than the first time they took the test; those who had walked through the city improved by only 0.5 digits—a small but statistically significant difference between the two groups.

It's okay to take a break during work and go for a walk through your local park. You'll be smarter afterwards.

DeepMind, the AI lab of Google’s Alphabet Inc., has labored for nearly two years to access medical records from the U.K.’s National Health Service for a diagnostics app. The agency began a trial with the company using 1.6 million patient records. Last month, the top U.K. privacy watchdog declared the trial violates British data-protection laws, throwing its future into question.

Contrast that with how officials handled a project in Fuzhou. Government leaders from that southeastern Chinese city of more than seven million people held an event on June 26. Venture capital firm Sequoia Capital helped organize the event, which included representatives from Dell Inc., International Business Machines Corp. and Lenovo Group Ltd. A spokeswoman for Dell characterized the event as the nation’s first "Healthcare and Medical Big Data Ecology Summit."

The summit involved a vast handover of data. At the press conference, city officials shared 80 exabytes worth of heart ultrasound videos, according to one company that participated. With the massive data set, some of the companies were tasked with building an AI tool that could identify heart disease, ideally at rates above medical experts. They were asked to turn it around by the fall.

This is data on a scale that the US and UK seemingly would never agree to data owners sharing with any private corporation. Though I wonder if university researchers could do so.

Tom Bartel, writing on the top 10 reasons you should become a manager. Here's my favorite:

"The only reason there’s so many awful managers is that good people like you refuse to do the job.”

You might have doubts if you are the right person for the job. You might wonder if you are the one who can settle conflicts, who can guide people, whom people trust to lead them. You might wonder if you deserve the position, and if it is justified to put you in that role.

Management isn't easy. But the adage that the best leaders are the reluctant ones has consistently proven true.

Toyota Motor Corp. said it was nearing a major technological breakthrough in electric-car batteries. [...] The technology, a solid electrolyte, would enable smaller, lighter lithium-ion batteries, which theoretically could hold a higher charge—boosting the range of electric vehicles, according to the company.

These so-called solid-state batteries replace the damp electrolyte solution in current batteries with a solid. That allows for an improvement in shelf life compared with current batteries on the market, which degrade over time. They also are designed to avoid the fire hazard sometimes posed by current lithium-ion batteries.

This battery tech seems better in almost every way.

The announcement comes as Toyota shifts focus to building all-electric vehicles after years of asserting their inferiority to gas-electric hybrids and hydrogen fuel-cells.

With Uber CEO Travis Kalanick officially taking a leave of absence, and his effective right-hand Emil Michael gone from the company, the day-to-day duties of running Uber now fall to a committee consisting of Kalanick’s direct reports.